Capital Culture

Gender at Work in the City

Linda McDowell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780631205319, 9780631205302
• eBook ISBN: 9781444399646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The changing nature of waged work in contemporary advanced industrial nations is one of the most significant aspects of political and economic debate. It is also the subject of intense debate among observers of gender. Capital Culture explores these changes focusing particularly on the gender relations between the men and women who work in the financial services sector. The multiple ways in which masculinities and femininities are constructed is revealed through the analysis of interviews with dealers, traders, analysts and corporate financiers.

Drawing on a range of disciplinary approaches, the various ways in which gender segregation is established and maintained is explored. In fascinating detail, the everyday experiences of men and women working in a range of jobs and in different spaces, from the dealing rooms to the boardrooms, are examined. This volume is unique in focusing on men as well as women, showing that for men too there are multiple ways of doing gender at work.

Part I

Gender at Work

1

Thinking through Work: Gender, Power and Space

The fabric of the advanced economies has been enlarged to encompass new sectors, new jobs, and new ways of working.... taking shapes previously unimagined.

A. Sayer and R. Walker, 1992, p. 2

INTRODUCTION: ORGANISATION, SPACE AND CULTURE

In this chapter, I want to counterpose a number of sets of literatures to draw out some questions about the changing organisation and distribution of waged work, especially its feminisation, that will be explored in detail in different ways in the chapters that make up this book. As many analyses have made clear, there is an evident, empirically demonstrable, trend towards the ‘feminisation’ of work in contemporary Britain. In using this term, I intend to indicate a great deal more than the numerical increase in the numbers of women entering waged employment in the labour markets of Britain’s towns and cities. I also want to encompass the shift to service sector employment, where the attributes of growing numbers of jobs and occupations are based, in the main, on those purportedly feminine attributes of serving and caring, as well as what organisational theorists and management consultants see as a trend towards the feminisation of management structures and practices with a growing emphasis on less hierarchical, more empathetic and cooperative styles of management. The popular as well as the academic literature in these areas includes praise for non-hierarchical structures, for empathy and caring in the workplace and a range of other essentialised feminine attributes. Indeed, so lyrical has a stream of this literature become about feminised attributes that women have been dubbed ‘the new Japanese’ of organisational theory by one over-enthusiastic advocate (Helgasen, 1990). If these literatures are to be believed, if sheer numbers of women in the labour market are emphasised and the terms and conditions of many women’s employment are ignored, it might seem that women are entering a new period of success and empowerment in the late twentieth century world of work. Some grounds for this optimism, as well as contradictory evidence, will be revealed in later chapters in the specific circumstances of merchant banking in the City of London.

The empirical evidence about the purported feminisation of organisations has been paralleled by a remarkable expansion in theoretically grounded studies of service-based economies. In a range of disciplines and from a range of perspectives, the changing nature of work and structure of organisations has been the focus of recent attention. A particularly noticeable trend in this work has been what we might term a ‘cultural turn’, in which the the perception of work and workplaces as active forces in the social construction of workers as embodied beings has become a prominent emphasis. Rather than seeing the workplace as a site which men and women as fixed and finished products enter to become labour power, the ways in which the workplace or the organisation play a key role in the constitution of subjects is becoming clear. It is this work that has been a major influence here, especially studies that have examined the gendering of organisations, the construction of work as emotional labour and the management of feeling and the significance of embodiment – of men and women as physical beings of different sizes, shapes, skin colours and sexual proclivities and preferences as well as gendered attributes – in workplace interactions. To this incisive and significant literature, I want to bring a specifically geographical imagination and suggest that the location and the physical construction of the workplace – its site and layout, the external appearance and the internal layout of its buildings and surrounding environment – also affects, as well as reflects, the social construction of work and workers and the relations of power, control and dominance that structure relations between them. Here a set of literatures from geography, architecture and urban sociology are useful. The link between these different literatures, between sociological and geographical imaginations, is the notion of performance, especially the new theoretical work on the body as a site of inscription and cultural analyses of the body. The social constructionist literature has, for several decades from Goffman (1961, 1963) onwards, fruitfully used the notion of the stage and performance as a way of understanding everyday behaviours and interactions, and this is mirrored in some of the earliest feminist writing about gender roles. More recently, feminist scholars have developed a psychoanalytically based notion of gender itself as a performance (Butler, 1990a, b). In the work on the built environment, the physical structures of the workplace and the street, Sennett’s (1977) classic examination of the decline of the public arena uses the concept of performance as a key to unlock changing attitudes to public and private spaces. His argument that the significance of the street was reduced by the fear of others and otherness has parallels too with the long tradition in feminist scholarship on woman as ‘Other’. This work has fruitful links with analyses of organisational culture and with detailed explorations of the ways in which the body is inscribed by these cultures and by specific workplace practices.

A focus on the body as culturally inscribed but also as occupying a range of different spaces in the city, both inside and outside, public and private, is one way of bringing together different theoretical, disciplinary and methodological approaches. All these themes are an important part of developing an understanding of social behaviour in merchant banks. My aim, therefore, is to bring together approaches that are too often kept separate with their emphases on different spatial scales, be it the individual or the economy as a whole, or at an in between scale, the organisation. I want to show how individual behaviour at work, the social construction of gender divisions, the redevelopment of the built environment in the City of London and the restructuring of employment in contemporary industrial economies like Britain may be linked together and so better illuminate the wide-ranging social and economic changes in the nature, organisation and distribution of work in Britain. As Sassen (1996) has recently suggested, in a schematic outline of new ways of thinking about the economy of global cities, it is work in ‘the analytic borderlands’ that seems provocative in explaining the complex and changing structure of the economies of global cities. New work is needed, she has suggested, in ‘several systems of representation, [each] with its own definitions, rules, boundaries, narratives, constructing a dialogue across each’ (p. 184), and she believes, as I do, that ‘theoretical work on the body... opens up new possibilities for analyses of the sort I am exploring here’ (p. 185).

MEN’S JOBS, WOMEN’S JOBS: EMPLOYMENT CHANGE IN THE 1980S AND 1990S

As well as a book about money, this is a book about gender, power and space and the ways in which they are connected to each other and to the changing nature of waged work in contemporary Britain. Like other advanced industrial nations, the last decades of the twentieth century in Britain have been marked by a series of remarkable changes in the nature and location of waged work. So great has been the impact of these changes that Pahl has suggested that waged work is the dominant but unresolved question at the end of the twentieth century: ‘confusion and ambiguities about its meaning, nature and purpose in our lives are widespread’ (Pahl, 1988, p. 1). The world as we thought we knew it has vanished. The post-war certainty about the nature of work, when it was assumed that full-time, waged employment for men was the norm, is now revealed as an exception, dominant only for three brief decades between 1945 and 1975 (Pahl, 1984). As in earlier centuries, it seems clear that waged work for growing numbers of people, perhaps even for a majority, was and will be discontinuous, interrupted and uncertain (Rifkin, 1996) – in short, a world of employment that has always been familiar to most women.

The remarkable series of changes that was set in motion in Great Britain, and indeed in other advanced industrial economies, from the mid 1960s onwards to their apotheosis in the late 1980s seems to have finally buried the belief in the permanency of work. In the 1980s, the nature and structure of waged work in these societies, its organisation and rewards, the types of tasks undertaken and the people who did them, as well as the places in which they laboured, changed irrevocably. The relative certainty of life-time employment, often for a single employer and frequently in the same place, that had faced men in the post-war decades was swept away in a rhetoric and reality of flexibility, restructuring, casualisation, polarisation and feminisation. The decline of manufacturing employment in western industrial economies that had been evident for two decades accelerated in the 1980s, and increasing numbers of people found themselves employed in the service economy in a range of occupations from selling haircuts to selling financial advice. These new jobs in the service sector – new only in the sense that they came to dominate these economies – were unevenly distributed across space and between the population. Old manufacturing heartlands suffered serious employment decline, whereas the sunbelt in the south and south west of the United States, and the golden arc or triangle joined by Bristol, London and Cambridge in Britain, increased their share of national employment and associated prosperity.

For a time Pahl’s thesis about the changing nature of work seemed overly gloomy and, as the 1980s progressed, the huge expansion of employment in the service sector seemed to counter his pessimism. In the South East of England in particular, economic growth accelerated in the mid 1980s after a period of recession in the early years of that decade, and there was a widespread belief in the buoyant middle years of the decade that the expanding financial services sector heralded a new secure economic future for Britain. New forms of work based on the ownership, control, movement of and access to money led to the rise of new types of well-paid, middle-class occupations which in combination were dubbed a ‘new service class’ or a new cultural class (Savage et al., 1992; Thrift, 1989; Urry, 1986). This was the group designated ‘yuppies’ in popular culture. While the term ‘yuppy’ was used, without doubt, to include professional workers in the financial services sector, the label ‘new service class’ tended to be used more restrictively to distinguish a group of workers in what might be referred to as the cultural industries – in marketing, advertising and public relations as well as TV and radio producers and presenters, magazine journalists, fashion writers, and arts administrators and performers. The helping professions – social workers, therapists etc. – are also often included in this new class fraction. This group of middle-class workers were identified as being of key significance in the socio-economic changes that seemed to be sweeping 1980s Britain, Their attitudes to work, it was argued, were different from both the old bourgeoisie and the old manufacturing-based working class. For this new middle class or cultural class, work was fun: indeed, the boundaries between work and leisure were increasingly difficult to define as the social relations of production and consumption merged into each other (Du Gay, 1996). Questions of style and performance, of the ownership and possession of a range of ‘positional’ goods – the Filofax, a Peugeot car, Gucci shoes, a gentrified flat or house in an inner area that was, in estate agents’ parlance, ‘rapidly improving’ – all marked out these workers as a distinct class fraction (Thrift, 1989). This group, it was argued, were also the leaders in a shift towards an increasing emphasis on cultural production, on consumption and lifestyle, on images and the aestheticisation of life, that had become a significant feature of late modern capitalist societies (Featherstone, 1991a; Giddens, 1990, 1991). Working with the media, the new cultural class actively promoted the ideas of ‘celebrity intellectuals’ (Featherstone, 1991a, p. 45) who embraced the popular. Indeed, Bourdieu designated the class as a whole the ‘new intellectuals’ because of their adoption of a learning mode or attitude towards life (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 370). As well as ideas, this class was said to be ‘fascinated by identity, presentation, appearance, lifestyle and the endless quest for new experiences’ (Featherstone, 1991a, p. 44). It is also significant that a spatial referrent was attached to the group. Paralleling geographers’ arguments about deterritorialisation, Featherstone suggested that the new cultural class had a ‘frequent lack of anchoring in terms of a specific locale or community’ (1991a, p. 44), although other theorists identified a specifically local impact of the group who were among the key actors in the gentrification of inner area housing markets in the global cities in which they worked (King, 1990a, 1993; Sassen, 1990). Many of the new cultural industries were also located in inner areas (Zukin, 1995), resulting in new political alliances, bringing together ‘professional politicians, government administrators, local politicians, businessmen, financiers, dealers, investors, artists, intellectuals, educators, cultural intermediaries, and publics [and] has resulted in new interdependencies and strategies that have changed power balances and produced alliance between groups that may previously have perceived their interests as opposed’ (Featherstone, 1991a, p. 47). As I shall show in later chapters, high-status workers in the financial services sector increasingly identify with this configuration in their attitudes to work and leisure, and in their aetheticisation of everyday life.

The remarkably uncritical tone in which the new cultural class is analysed by some, however, was challenged by the reassertion of the cold world of economics in the celebration of consumption. As Harvey (1989a) never ceased to argue, the ‘postmodern’ turn to consumption was little more than ‘the cultural froth of late capitalism’. The mechanisms of class division and exploitation ground on slowly and surely below the surface, and the emphasis on aestheticisation and lifestyle merely disguised the insecurity of many of those employed in the new service industries. The bubble of service sector expansion burst at the end of the decade. In Britain and the US, between 1990 and 1992, there was recession and a ‘shakeout’ of service sector employment, and PahPs next examination of work had a pessimistic title: After Success (Pahl, 1995), Financiers, dealers, lawyers and cultural workers alike were reminded of the harsh world of economic reality as unemployment rose and the housing market suffered an almost unparalleled crisis as real prices fell. Many of those who had bought into the gentrified lifestyle in inner areas or dockland conversions were stranded in negative equity as the value of their property fell below the loan secured to purchase it. A new literature about downsizing and shakeouts and the advantages of a less pressurised lifestyle – an individual’s choice to downshift matching enforced corporate downsizing – began to replace the more outrageous of the 1980s texts that had celebrated the ‘greed is good’ ethos. But even in the boom years, the expansion in service sector employment had not brought prosperity for all. While many of the new jobs were highly paid, demanding increasingly well-qualified employees who were rewarded commensurately, the greatest expansion of employment had been in poorly paid, often casual and temporary work at the bottom end of the service sector – perhaps more accurately called ‘servicing^, rather than service occupations. In the 1980s, the fastest growing jobs in the US economy, for example, included retail assistants, nursing auxiliaries, care attendants in old people’s homes, janitors, truck drivers, waitresses and waiters (Castells, 1989; Christopherson, 1989; Sassen, 1990). The list in Great Britain was similar (Handy, 1994; Lawless et al., 1996), The net result was a widening pay differential between the well paid and the poorest paid. For those in the bottom decile of the income distribution, for example, the decade brought an absolute as well as a relative decline in their share of the total earnings from employment (Rowntree Foundation, 1995).

As well as growing income polarisation, the 1980s saw the continuation of a shift of employment from men to women which had begun with manufacturing decline in the 1960s. In the ten years after 1966, the net decline in manufacturing output led to significant job losses, of which 73 per cent were jobs previously held by men, but only 27 per cent by women. Over the same decade, the net increase in private sector services resulted in a 125 per cent increase in jobs for women, but a 44 per cent decrease in men’s service employment (Dex, 1987), In the next 15 years, the loss from the manufacturing sector slowed down but the attrition of men’s employment continued. Consequently, by the beginning of the 1990s, there were 3.5 million fewer men in waged employment than at the beginning of the 1960s and almost 3 million more women, although as women were more likely to work part-time, the total number of hours worked had fallen (McDowell, 1991; Walby, 1988).

These figures reflect a transformation in the labour market behaviour of women in Great Britain in the post-war era. In response to employment restructuring and to social changes from reliable contraception to new patterns of consumption (McDowell, 1989), more and more women entered the workforce. At the beginning of the 1990s, more than half of all women and almost 60 per cent of married women were economically active (Department of Employment, 1992b), compared to just over a third of all women and a fifth of married women in 1951. The time women spend out of the labour force is also becoming shorter, with 45 per cent of women returning to work and an additional 20 per cent looking for work within nine months of childbirth. While the overwhelming majority of women in paid work with young children still work part- time, an increasing proportion are returning to full-time employment after childbirth. The rate of return to full-time rather than part-time work rose from 5 to 15 per cent between 1971 and 1991 (McRae, 1991).

The feminisation of the labour market is not, however, an undifferentiated process. Just as work is becoming increasingly differentiated as a whole in its conditions and rewards, women as waged workers are also becoming increasingly differentiated (Crompton et al., 1996; McDowell, 1991; Phillips, 1989). Whereas a minority of well-educated women are able to enter and hold on to full-time work in professional occupations, the majority of women in waged work are in part-time jobs at the bottom end of the labour market. Thus, the proportion of women able to return to work after giving birth, for example, differs according to the type of work they do or are willing to accept. In comparison with other occupational groups, women professionals and associate professionals (the latter group includes teachers, health and social workers and librarians) are more likely to return and most likely to return full-time. Many of these women are in public sector employment where provision for working mothers in the form of flexible working and part-time work is more usual. Women managers and administrators in the private sector, on the other hand, have a lower rate of return, partly reflecting restricted opportunities for part-time employment at this level (McRae, 1991). Women professionals, as a group, are less likely than either managers and administrators or secretarial and clerical workers to experience downward occupational mobility (Brannen, 1989; Dex, 1987).

These trends reinforce arguments based on the analysis of pay differentials which suggest that women are becoming increasingly differentiated as a workforce. Throughout the 1980s, a growing proportion of women gained educational qualifications and they are beginning to constitute a substantial proportion of those entering professional occupations. Young women improved their performance in school-leaving examinations throughout the 1980s, and as the 1990s began, there was almost no difference between the proportions of men and women aged 20–24 gaining degrees (11 and 10 per cent respectively), although considerable differences still exist in the subjects they study (Department of Employment, 1992a; Government Statistical Service, 1992). Such is the evident success of women in school, university and professional examinations, that a crisis of male under-achievement has been recognised as the popular and academic press begins to investigate ‘boys who fail’ and young men with little hope of steady employment (Campbell, 1993; Wilkinson and Mulgan, 1995).

These trends in the education sector and in the labour market have resulted in a rising number of women gaining access to professional occupations – once the bastions of masculine privilege. In some cases women’s representation in the professions has increased dramatically. Examples include law, banking, accountancy, pharmacy and medicine. In 1991, for example, almost half the new entrants to the legal profession in Great Britain were women, up from 19 per cent in 1975 (Crompton et al., 1990; Rice, 1991). In banking, women accounted for just 2 per cent of successful finalists in the Institute of Banking examinations in 1970, but by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Money and Work
• Part I: Gender at Work
• Part II: Bodies at Work
• Appendix: The Field Work
• Bibliography
• Index